


Prompt Collection

by lapiccolacoccinella



Category: Original Work
Genre: Ghosts, Haunted Houses, Horror, Italian, Lesbians, Oracles, Original Fiction, Other, Short Story, Sleeping Sickness, Vampires, collection, dying, original horror - Freeform, prompts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-11
Updated: 2018-11-18
Packaged: 2019-08-22 03:43:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16590221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lapiccolacoccinella/pseuds/lapiccolacoccinella
Summary: These are some original short pieces that I wrote using prompts from writingprompt.com (or at least from their Twitter).  I've been wanting to stretch myself to do more original writing for a while, especially more horror writing, but needed a little inspiration.  What you'll find here is the stuff I'm more proud of, probably all of which could be taken further, but which I'd like some feedback on first. Again, a lot of this will be short horror, so keep that in mind when reading.





	1. The Oracle

“A homeless man can see the future, but no one believes him.”

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

The Oracle

 

He warned us.  He ranted and he raved, he begged and he insisted.  And we didn’t listen. He was a homeless madman! Why should we have?

But he was right.  The dark was returning.

It didn’t happen all at once, but slowly over the course of many months.  Insidious and determined, it crept in right under our noses. And he would shout, “It is here with us now!  It will take us all, in the end!” And we would look away, embarrassed for him, and for how he made us feel about our discomfort with madness.

The days got shorter.  But this was normal, as the seasons were changing.  See, that’s how good the darkness was, sneaking in when we would least expect it.  We didn’t notice when it stole a few more seconds here and there, because we were already grumbling about how tired we all felt, how this early sunset was going to wreak havoc on our sleep schedules, our moods, our motivation.  It ate all our delicious negativity, and it grew and grew.

When the sun was only out for the span of time we were all at work, we began to notice.  The old man, he would scream and scream, cry and beg the sun to stay. Pray to whatever gods were listening.  But they didn’t listen to him either, before or after the darkness returned. Maybe because they didn’t exist -- but if this darkness did, then who’s to say what wonders there are outside our little lives?

And then people started dying.  The sickness began when they couldn’t get out of bed.  “It’s too dark, I just want to sleep.” And sleep they would.  In the beginning they’d get up still, a few times during the brief sunlit hours.  Go to the bathroom, have a snack. But soon, they just gave in. They slept.

And slept.

And slept.

And died.

Sleeping.

Surely, there are worse ways to go.  It’s easy to give in to the darkness, the sleep, the release.  No more running, no more fighting. No more worrying about getting ahead, staying on top, striving and striving for little reward.  No, it was better to sink into the pillows and sink into death, as the darkness wrapped velvety arms around your neck and pressed ever-so-gently.

It didn’t get him, though.  At least, it hadn’t the last time I left bed.  I hear him sometimes, though I can’t tell if that’s just the dreams.  They shift and blur, the whirligig spinning of harlequin colors and tinkle-bell songs, and I never know if I’ve actually moved from bed at all because it is all so confused and confusing.  And forever there is the gentle tug, the whisper that tells me that this is so much better, so much easier.

Behind the whisper there is the scream.

“It will take us all!”

I can’t move.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't love the trope of the homeless madman, but I *do* like oracles, and in my experience no one ever goddamn listens to them in stories! Was thinking a lot about the sleeping sickness, and of Neil Gaiman's Sandman series when I wrote this one. I'd like to play more with the idea of dreams going forward.


	2. Insanguinata Maria

“An acquaintance suffers from a unique addiction.”

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Insanguinata Maria

 

It started small.  It always does, and then before you know it...well.  I’m getting ahead of myself.

Maria had cut herself while cooking, a common enough accident.  Nicked her thumb, and then the hot red drop of blood welled up almost instantly upon the olive-pink of her thumbprint.  And she just popped it right into her mouth, muttering around it about getting a bandage as she bustled off to the bathroom.

A common enough accident.  But when I came over again the next week, she had an awful lot of bandages wrapped around all her fingers.  And she was looking a little wan, her normally ruddy skin turned nearly gray.

“Still a klutz with a knife?” I asked, dropping my purse into an armchair while she walked up to give me a hug.  She chuckled.

“Something like that,” she breathed, already shimmying toward the kitchen.  

But it wasn’t like that, because the _following_ week, there were the chicken corpses.

“Oh, Francesca!  I know it seems strange, but I just can’t help myself….” and I watched, horrified that I wasn’t more surprised, as she took a lascivious swig from a wine glass, its contents all smeared and sticky against its sides.  “You’re the only one who knows,” she breathed, and her breath was metallic and strange, her voice thick. But she looked healthier, at least. If she got sick, well...we could deal with that when the time came. I didn’t let her kiss me that night.  

But I did the next time, when there were twice as many headless chickens and twice as much tension between us.  Because that red smear against her lips brought up other red-smeared images, because she was still beautiful in her gluttony, in her lust.  Because her curly hair stuck just-so to her neck when she sweated in the moonlight that pooled in her bedroom. Because I had never been able to deny her.  I never wanted to deny her.

It got worse and worse, every time.  After chickens there were rabbits, and squirrels, and raccoons -- animals no one would miss, but which didn’t have very much blood.  Or at least not enough to sate her. And she wasn’t just drinking it anymore. She was bathing in it, bathing me in it, wiping it across her walls.  She had forgone all other foods, all the cheese and pastas and even wine. Occasionally she would bite into the raw meat of one of her prey, gnaw on a muscle and suck out every morsel she could gulp down.

Sometimes I would think that I needed to get her help, needed to get her out.  This wasn’t normal, wasn’t healthy. But then she would look at me askance, the whites of her eyes now shot through with ruby veins, and she’d smile and I could _swear_ I thought I saw fangs.

“What happened?” I whispered to her once, as we lay in her bed.  She moaned pleasurably.

“I’m not sure,” she responded, “but I don’t mind.”  I didn’t tell her that I did, that I was concerned. Because I wasn’t sure at all what I felt.

One month after her little kitchen accident, I opened the door and called out my presence.

“Francesca!” she exclaimed, her arms outstretched in the kitchen doorway.  “Tesoro! Are you on your period?” Her smile was too wide by half. And yet I was the fly walking willingly into my beloved spider’s web.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uh, this one kind of got away from me fast, haha. I'm pleased with the result, though. "Insanguinata Maria" means "Bloody Mary" in Italian -- not very original, but I liked the way it sounded. I'm hoping it's actually a little scary and not just "ooooo, lesbian vampires," though take whatever you can from it. :P My nod of inspiration this time goes to Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's lady vampire story, 'Carmilla.'


	3. Hallow House

We hadn’t been on the road very long before my husband frowned and said, “Something’s not right with the car.”  It was a winding country road, mostly drowned in darkness except for the pinprick of streetlights every mile or so, and the steady beam of our little hatchback’s headlights.  He told me he was going to find the next streetlamp and pull up on the side of the road next to it and see what the trouble was.

“James,” I hissed.  “It’s the middle of the night!  We shouldn’t be pulling over along the side of an abandoned road in the middle of the night!”

“It’ll be fine,” he said, but his voice was straining in an unusual way.  My husband is an imminently practical man, not given to paranoia or anxiety.  And since I am generally given to those things, I began to worry not only about the fate of our car, but about how much it was bothering him.

We could see the next streetlight up ahead, and as we approached could also see some great hulking mass beside it, still dark from this distance but gaining definition as we slowly neared.  As James rolled the car up to park it up on the grass, we saw that it was a dilapidated house, with a small run-down shed squatting beside it. In the glow from the lamp it looked threatening, each shadow stretched and deep.  I was rooted to my seat in the passenger’s side.

“I don’t like this at all,” I murmured, remembering every cautionary tale of my youth and every tiny detail of the admittedly sparse knowledge I had about serial killers.  Were there any out here in Western Massachusetts? I didn’t know, but I thought it safer to assume there were.

“Don’t worry, Mo,” James said, unbuckling his seatbelt.  “I just want to look under the hood for a second.

“Do you even know what you’re looking for?  What’s wrong with the car, anyway?” He paused for a second, his hand still holding the buckle.

“It was kind of...pulling forward?  It’s hard to explain. Though it stopped just a moment ago.  I might be imagining things.” He let the belt go snapping back into its resting place.

“Please make it quick,” I said, staring up at the house.  “Who knows what’s living in there.” He cracked the door open and an unseasonably biting cold wind blew in.

“Raccoons, probably,” he said.  “You love raccoons!” And then he unfolded himself into the outdoors.  He closed the door behind him. 

I knew that in the daytime, I wouldn’t feel so nervous about this janky old house.  In the daytime, those shadows wouldn’t seem to move, to stretch and shrink, to look like they were reaching out toward the car. 

I rummaged in my bag quickly, pulling out the tiny rosary ring I kept there for the times when I couldn’t talk down my anxiety.  I didn’t so much believe that the Virgin Mary could save us from serial killers, but doing something familiar and meditative even without the belief had helped me many times.  I clamped my finger and thumb down on the little cross and prepared myself to lay into the Our Father.

While I muttered the prayers, James lifted the hood of the car.  He had parked so that he got some light from the streetlamp, but I wondered vaguely how helpful that could really be, especially since he didn’t know much about cars to begin with.  Why hadn’t we just called a tow truck or a mechanic? It’s not like we didn’t have our phones with us. I picked mine up off my lap and tried to see if I could look one up, deciding to be helpful instead of nervous for once.  As soon as I had, however, James slammed the hood back down and flopped back into the driver’s seat.

“I have no idea what I’m looking for, honestly,” he said, his head back against the headrest, the keys dangling from his fingers between his long legs.  

“I was just going to look up a mechanic,” I said, gesturing with my phone.  He shook his head, plunging the key into the ignition.

“Don’t bother.  I think maybe I was just feeling tired or something.  Totally imagining things.” I was uneasy. Like I said, James isn’t really the type of person who would fabricate car troubles out of the blue.  Suddenly he cursed. “The GPS signal is acting up,” he clarified.

I looked back at the house.  The wind had picked up again, and the whole frame of the great wreck seemed to sway.  Before James had an opportunity to turn the key and start the car, I put my hand out on his arm and demanded that he look.  I needn’t have bothered, though, because the ground had started to shake and buckle, and he had already flicked his gaze forward.

The house was rising.  Dirt was rolling down off ancient boards, the streetlight was guttering and flickering, and the whole entire goddamn  _ house _ was floating six feet above where it had rested.  There was a hole in the ground, what had once been a root cellar, I surmised, though it was hard to gauge the age of the dwelling in the dark.  Still, it had come up with no foundation, so I felt my guess was justified.

“Holy shit,” I heard my husband breathe beside me, and I thought vaguely behind the panic how strange this must be for him, for someone who believes in no gods, in no ghosts, in nothing magical or supernatural.  James is open-minded, for sure, but he’s also very comfortable in his Atheism. His eyes were as large as hubcaps now, and I couldn’t tell if he was breathing. But I didn’t want to study him too long, as I couldn’t bear to miss what was going on before me.

I was terrified, no doubt, but I was also excited.  All fears of serial killers were swept away but the sudden assertion of what was obviously ghosts.  And while ghosts certainly  _ scare  _ me, in the sense that I don’t understand how they work, I’m not  _ afraid _ of them, not afraid of being harmed by them.

The house just floated there, the shed beside it still firmly rooted to the ground, for no more than a minute.  But that minute felt like ages, and surely our hearts hammering probably did the work of what would normally be several hours.  When it was done, it crashed back down suddenly, with none of the elegance it had mustered to rise. I noticed a board fall off the side of the house, and others come free from an errant nail or two.  

We sat there in shock-inspired silence for another full minute before either of us dared to move or speak.

“What...what was that?” James asked, eyes still fixed ahead.  I shook my head. The fear had drained out of me, as I knew nothing even close to that bizarre could happen now.

“It’s haunted,” I said simply, and much to my surprise, he nodded.

“I...I wonder if that’s what was pulling,” he muttered.  I looked at him, pale with his knuckles gripping the steering wheel.

“Would...would you like me to drive?” I asked.  I didn’t want to drive; in fact I wasn’t sure either of us were quite fit for it.  But leaving was certainly a better option that sticking around for the next show, so he and I quickly swapped seats.

The GPS worked just fine now as I directed it toward home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was not inspired by a prompt, but by a dream I had! I remember it being really bizarre in the dream, and I felt that way when I was writing it...but it's turned out kind of silly? Regardless, I like it so I thought I'd share.
> 
> And yes, I really am married, and yes my husband does really call me "Mo." :P


End file.
